The disclosure relates to information management.
Business decisions rely on the ability to search, classify, aggregate, and analyze content of structured, semi-structured and unstructured data from possibly many heterogeneous sources in coherent ways. Having distinct systems for database content (structured data) and files (semi-structured or unstructured data) is complicated, expensive and non-uniform in functionality.
To support the processing of data of different types or from heterogeneous sources, a more flexible data model is needed than, for example, the relational database model or classical object-oriented data models that enforce a very static predefined data schema into which all data needs to be forced.